Cisco today announced that the University of Technology and Life Sciences in Bydgoszcz, known as UTP, has completed the modernization of its campus and research networks based on the Cisco® Borderless Network architecture. With the new, IPv6-enabled infrastructure, UTP is leveraging the value of the network for education and research and provides highly secure wired and wireless Internet access for more than 9,000 students and 1,000 employees.

The Shanghai and TIMES Higher Education World rankings are the key indicators of University quality and reputation. We are scheduling a Telepresence conference to hear from some of the universities ranked in the top 200 by these organisations, and will be asking them to discuss the actions that they were able to take to gain their position and how they are maintaining their status.

We also invited Universities, which are not listed in the ranking yet to hear what are their plans to enter the ranking. In particular we will be asking them about the use of technology to achieve this objective.

This will be a introductory discussion that will be continued in one of the breakouts of the Public Sector Summit in Stockholm later this year and will be followed by some intermediate discussions.

WCET Executive Director Ellen D. Wagner will give a keynote at Campus Technology 2011, just prior to the CT 2011 Innovator Awards recognition ceremony. CT asked for her views on IT innovation and adoption in higher education.

Cisco today announced that Monash University, Australia’s largest university, will use Cisco TelePresenceTM to provide a virtual, real-time connection between medical students on work placement in rural Victoria and teaching staff located at central campuses.

Monash University’s Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences is extending the in-person classroom environment to medical students on work placement in rural Victoria through Cisco TelePresence, an immersive, lifelike communications experience that combines high-definition video and high-quality audio to realistically convey the body language and human elements that are critical to the interactive nature of a classroom.

„In the online world you don’t need to fill buildings or lecture theatres with people and you don’t need to be trapped into a lecture timetable,“ says Peter Scott, director of the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute.

Information technology is a multi-faceted and potentially disruptive phenomenon and we should not assume business as usual, the President of the Commonwealth of Learning, Sir John Daniel*, told the congress.

Delivering the first international keynote address, Daniel said that if used properly, education technology could achieve wider access, higher quality and lower cost all at the same time. He said this was a revolution – it had never happened before – but public universities had failed to achieve these advantages and could lose out to private providers.